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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

As I mentioned in my previous post about laptops and iPads in healthcare, I had the chance to meet with Kaiser at the Health 2.0 conference in Boston. I had a chat with Brian Gardner, head of the Mobile Center of Excellence at Kaiser Permanente and learned a bunch of interesting things about how Kaiser looks at mobile healthcare.

The first most interesting thing to note was that Kaiser currently does not support any sort of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) at this time. Although, they said that they’ve certainly heard the requests from their doctors to find a way for the doctor to use their own mobile device. Since this means that all the mobile devices in use at Kaiser are issued by them, I was also a little surprised to find that the majority of their users are currently still using Blackberry devices.

Brian did say that the iPhone is now an approved Kaiser device. It will be interesting to check in with Brian and Kaiser a year from now to see how many Blackberry devices have been replaced with iPhones. I’m pretty sure we know exactly what’s going to happen, but I’ll have to follow up to find out. What is worth noting though is the time delay for an enterprise organization like Kaiser to be able to replace their initial investment in Blackberry devices with something like an iPhone or Android device. While I’m sure that many of those doctors have their own personal iPhones, that doesn’t mean they can use it for work.

I also asked Brian about the various ways that he sees the Kaiser physicians using their mobile devices. His first response was that a large part of them were using it as an email device. This would make some sense in the context of most of their devices being Blackberry phones which were designed for email.

He did say that Kaiser had done some video pilots on their mobile devices. I’ll be interested to hear the results of these pilot tests. It’s only a matter of time before we can do a video chat session with a doctor from our mobile device and what better place to start this than at Kaiser?

Of course, the other most popular type of mobile apps used at Kaiser were related to education apps. I wonder how many Epocrates downloads are used by Kaiser doctors every day. I imagine it gets a whole lot of use.

What I found even more intriguing was the way that Kaiser used to discover and implement apps. Brian described that many of their best apps have come from students or doctors who had an idea for an app. They then take that idea and make it a reality with that student or doctor working on the app. It sounded like many of these students or doctors saw a need and created an app. Then, after seeing its success Kaiser would spread it through the rest of the organization.

This final point illustrates so well how powerful mobile health can be now that the costs to developing a mobile health innovation is so low. Once you lower the cost of innovation the way mobile health has done, you open up the doors to a whole group of entrepreneurs to create amazing value.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

As I mentioned previously, I had the great opportunity to talk with Kaiser recently about their mobile initiatives at Health 2.0 Boston. It was a great chat with Brian Gardner, head of the Mobile Center of Excellence at Kaiser Permanente.

At one point in the conversation I asked Brian about Kaiser’s approach to devices. Did they allow physicians to bring their own device? Were they deploying their own devices and which devices did they use. Brian made a couple of comments that I found really intriguing.

First, he stated clearly that Kaiser issued all of their devices. They were looking at the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) idea, but currently they didn’t support any BYOD options. Based on his response to this question I could tell that there were a lot of conversations about this topic happening at Kaiser. I got the feeling that they were likely getting quite a bit of pressure from their doctors to do something along these lines.

Brian then also provided what I find to be a really compelling observation. He commented that from their experience the laptops they issued to doctors always seemed to end up with their physician’s kids using them. I assume they could see this based upon the software the physician’s children installed on the laptop. Then, Brian observed that they hadn’t seen the same thing happening with the iPads they’d given out. He surmised that this was possibly because many of the doctors that got iPads saw it as a privilege and those doctors didn’t want to lose that privilege?

How intriguing no? Why is it that a laptop feels like a commodity and an iPad feels like a luxury item? One you don’t mind your children touching and the other is a luxury that your child shouldn’t touch.

I’d also extend this observation to say that working on a laptop feels like work. Using an iPad feels more like play. At least that’s the feeling I get. I imagine many doctors feel the same way. I wonder if that will change as the iPad starts to get more applications that really help you do work on it.

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